Wellness
- Overcoming your worry
There
are a lot of us that spend too much time
worrying. According to The National Institute
on Mental Health, approximately 40 million
American adults ages 18 and older, or
about 18.1 percent of people in this age
group in a given year, have an anxiety
disorder. Anxiety prevents us from being
happy, can cause physical ailments, and
keeps us from taking healthy risks that
may improve the quality of our lives.
Worry
may be a trait that is passed on genetically
from your family or it may be an outcome
of your environment. One or both of your
parents may suffer from intense anxiety
and you learn to be anxious because it
is modeled for you as a way of living.
The worry is usually driven by a need
to have a guaranteed outcome. Of course
there are very few situations that result
in a sure-fire conclusion. Therefore the
worrying does not seem to have any purpose
or any positive effects in one’s
life.
The
worrying can become habitual where you
immediately turn to the feelings of anxiousness
in your stomach, the endless spinning
of your thoughts and the sense that disaster
is about to occur. You believe that there
is not an alternative to this way of being
because you have been processing information
in this manner your entire life.
However,
there is a means to transform the worrying
to peace through physical exercise. There
are many studies that conclude that physical
exercise brings a state of well being
and
calmness. There is research that indicates
that working out as little as 15 minutes
at a time will enable you to reach this
state.
First,
make an appointment with your physician
to clear you for participating in physical
exercise. While you are walking, running,
biking or other aerobic activity do the
following:
A
regular exercise program will help ease
your worrying. You will notice that the
confusion that is created by anxiety will
decrease or dissipate. You will discover
that issues that once seemed impossible
to approach, much less resolve, and become
much easier to work through. You can learn
to capture this peaceful feeling that
you obtain from exercising while you are
sedentary. This process won’t happen
overnight, but it can with practice.
A
regular exercise program can lead you
to living a life where you focus on living
happily in the present instead of worrying
about the future or dreading the past.
